Thanks Constance. Okay Mr. State, one thing I guess I should point out here is that you're talking to somebody who is the biggest aerospace enthusiast You will probably ever meet. I am extremely well-versed in the subject of aircraft and spacecraft. I have 25 years of experience in aerospace education and aerospace museum work and worked as a consultant for NASA/JPL. My job for them was to help the Galileo Mission Outreach eam put together a CD ROM that explaind the mission. Ironically the fact that I was not formally educated as an aerospace engineer turned out to be an asset. It turns out that a lot of engineers have difficulty explaining things in plain simple terms. You can believe me when I tell you that I took great lengths to try and eliminate anything earthly that could of been mistaken for those "craft". I realize that some of the reports in Project Sign had all kinds of shapes involved in them but I don't believe what those people were seeing were connected to the actual craft .
Think of it this way. Imagine there's a cat burglar in the neighborhood. They come on the radio and say "a man wearing an orange jacket and a blue hat has been breaking into homes." Suddenly the police get reports every time someone hears or sees something. The police will ask for a discription and tend to throw out discriptions that aren't constant. It's that simple. If you want to try to take each discription into account you will get nowere fast. You will come to the conclusion that the circus is in town.
In other posts in this forum I have laid out my "refugee" hypothesis. It involves one or more vary large multi generation design ships. Scientist and futurist today have speculated on how people from Earth May need to leave it some day in the face of some planet killing event and find a "new" earth. The movie interstellar deals with a storyline something like this. The problem with my theory and my view for some people is that it's not vary "paranormal". It's just normal for those people coming here. Of course, understand that I am NOT at all close minded to other theories and possibilities. But what I am close minded about is that, the "things" that were being seen were actual flying craft of some type. Going along with my hypothesis of the refugee aliens what people were seeing were scout ships. People like to speculate that "The aliens" (if they were aliens) were super super advanced and super super sophisticated to almost a supernatural level. And of course anything is possible. I personally don't think they were that advanced. Most people who studied this during that time have concluded that there were Three types of objects being seen; The disc shaped lifting body shaped vehicles were all the same except for one, there was one they said was shaped a little more like the "heel of the shoe" and there were consistent reports of that "heel ship". The other is the "blue light" which may have been seen even by pilots during World War II (FooFighters) I believe this to be some type of autonomous probe like thing.
The first book written by Donald Keyhoe gives a very valuable insight into the thought process and analysis during that time. I know that a lot of people want to suggest that these things were just some earthly secret aircraft. Trust me when I tell you this, I wish that were the case ,because to be honest with you, the idea of aliens coming here or even as refugees is a little scary, even if it is also somewhat exciting. Other theories such as "breakaway society's" and other weird things that I've been suggested aren't any less spooky to me.
If they were of US design then that design would've found itself some place down the road but it never did ( till the mid-70s). The hottest thing they had back then wwad the F-86 and the F-86 continued to be the hottest thing all the way through the Korean War. The biggest secret plane we had in 1947 was the X-1. Since I am not into believing in the "Evil Secret Government Idea" I don't think this country had secret "super technology" that we've never seen before. That is why I am not quite as strong a believer that the government was harboring the Alien saucer secret as much as people think they were. While they certainly didn't tell us everything they know I don't think they knew as much as we think.
Go on YouTube and look up Astronaut Gordon Cooper's UFO encounters. I didn't know him personally but I have friends who did and the guy is solid as a rock and not crazy.
As for foreign countries such as (what was left of) Germany or Russia creating craft like that the same thing applies. If the Soviets were capable of building anything like that ,they wouldn't have used Migs all the way up through the Vietnam War. Also the idea that things like that were created to scare people is completely absurd. Why build a flying saucer to scare people in the US when you could just fly a Russian bomber over to scare us. People in those days weren't afraid of flying saucers because they didn't associate them with aliens till the 1950s. And if you read Keyhoe's book or other material from that time you will see that most civilians thought the flying discs were of US design to begin with. Even personnel at Muroc Air Force Base (now Edwards) filed reports! Why would they do that for something they understood?
I guess in the end what I am saying is that while there IS plenty to study and plenty of phenomenon to wonder about I believe that this particular Mistry is worth deeper study and research. An analogy I will use this. The JFK assassination vs the RFK assassination. Robert F Kennedy's assassination was not delved into nearly as much as his brothers and there are so many more unanswered questions about that particular event that have never been answered or explained. Roswell is sort of the JFK of UFO study, meanwhile a bigger Mistry has been glossed over that may yield much more information about what was going on.
BTW I've really enjoyed this little discussion and I don't know about the rest of you, but I can't wait to hear the next show.
There's a lot in here so I'm going to try to treat the essentials as I see no reason to support a consistent single craft or two craft scenario coming out of the refugee mother ship as much as it has a lot of appeal:
Gordon Cooper:
The Roswell Slides Steal the Show!
I think that post leads to a more critical consideration. Just because they're astronaut, does not mean they can't catch the fever. Cooper is not strong proof of much except the excitement and conviction that comes with seeing unique things in the sky and space.
Air force base witnesses:
as Project Sign outlines there were competing theories being held at various bases. Some were ETH believers and others felt that ET visitation was nonsense. It's important to consider that there's a lot going on post WWII including fear and paranoia, Russian scare tactics, news of the ghost rockets, and then globally bits of UFO sightings are hitting radar. Secret US projects are ubiquitous with some in the know and others knowing nothing. This situation and all it's tensions appears to have maintained for quite some time. You get see there's a perfect storm here for many things to be see and following the dropping of some atomic bombs you can see how such things might even attract the attention of outsiders - possibly.
A sample of the problem and why Sign is not the be all and end all, but just a sampling of the modalities of thought given what people were seeing:
Even what people were seeing we're condensed into just saucers with some fins on the back, but then Sign identified four classes of objects, and
@Constance will find this interesting, even Charles Fort was cited as proof of ongoing visitation well prior to 1947, as a means to provide a secondary opinion that was not ETH based by Sign's authors, when their ETH was rejexted by their masters and who could not help citing Fort to allude to the fact that it was ET, for ET had been here before they alluded. I'm not saying that the project leads were cooking the books, just that they were faced with some incredible cases, including the up close and and high drama kind, objects black, white, sliver, disc shaped, rocket shaped, balls of light, funnel shaped objects with contrail & without, with fire sucking in and out, with sparks and with portholes and windows. I see no real great consistency.
But let's look at the silence:
"But in the summer of 1947 the formal operation called Project Sign was not yet in existence. Reports of flying disks were coming from everywhere, but the investigation of these reports was disorganized. The Pentagon, through Schulgen, responded first as the natural focal point. AFOIR-CO was given the initial responsibility in the person of Lt. Colonel Garrett.
He, Taylor, and Schulgen began to try to get their bases to investigate notable cases and forward the reports. They also enlisted the FBI, who assigned Special Agent S. W. Reynolds as the liaison. They began working furiously on this throughout July, involving Wright-Patterson now and then by direct communication with McCoy.
As July wore on into August, Garrett, Schulgen, and Reynolds became confused by a lack of interest and pressure emanating from the high echelons of the Pentagon. The previous year they had gone through an investigative furor about a subject that they considered to be similar to the flying discs, when hundreds of “ghost rocket” reports came out of Sweden and other European countries. In 1946, the top brass had exerted continuous pressure to find an answer, but now it had gone completely quiet. This puzzling void has been termed “the silence from topside.” It was very peculiar to Garrett and the FBI.
Their mutual suspicion was that the very highest officials knew what this phenomenon was already (Swords, 1991)."
So there are definitely interesting things taking place:
internal projects not for public consumption, nor for the FBI's consumption and so again we see that one hand does not always get informed with what the other is doing. But one thing that is for certain, people are seeing some very strange things all over the world, with a concentration of rockets in northern Europe and a great number in the US including a number of spectacular cases reported after Arnold, but preceding him. There is little if any commonality amongst cases just groupings and classes of shapes. There are many experimental craft being flown and lots of folks are reporting flying wings and other odd shaped craft. There's a wealth of these homegrown images that
@junius posted in the question bank for the Randle show. Formation flight reports mix well with these experimental possibilities. Post war paranoia must be assisting things no?
So I would also highlight three other points:
There is an epidemic taking place of sightings and we should not deny either the validity of the witness nor the role panic and fear in creating emotion in the witness. Just because you don't recognize it doesn't make it ET though many witnesses claimed ET, or it's just not of this earth.
Knowledge of debris re-entry, how to even begin to investigate such a phenomenon, and trying to collate and reconcile what's ache ponying in the airspaces of Europe, US and other sightings must have caused its own scientific curiosity and search for explanation. That the Project Sign leads are quoting Charles Fort tells you the nature of the influences at work. The classic Chiles-Whitted case can be looked at today more skeptically as debris re-entry as opposed to a portholed rocket. These scientists took what the witnesses said and then had to make scientific sense of it - that will produce its own results.
Finally this case from Sign:
"On February 18 at about 5 P.M., I was standing near my hog-pen about 100′ east of my house, when I heard the pheasants raising a disturbance and the chickens all rushed to the chicken-house.
I looked around toward the house to see what was causing it and saw something hovering just above the house. I ran toward the house, and it then lowered over the north end of the house and settled toward the ground. I was then very near it, approximately 6′ when it stopped about level with my face, and just wobbled around for an instant, fire belching out of it and sucking back in. The thing was about 4′ long, shaped something like a funnel.
There was a pipe sticking out the back of it, and once as it wobbled around, the pipe was sticking right at my belly. Suddenly there was a lot of sparks showered from it, and the fire increased as if a fuse might have lighted, and it took off in a north-westerly direction very fast, gaining altitude as it went. My wife heard it leave and ran out where I stood, and we watched it go, leaving a trail of smoke all the way. Suddenly there was a great cloud of smoke in the sky, not more than 40 seconds after it left my yard, and in a few seconds or more, we heard an explosion.
I then stepped off from my house to where it had been, and it was five steps. Yes, it was hot, I could feel the heat from it. Had I not been washing my car prior to the occurrence, wetting the ground, there would have been a bare spot in the yard where the thing started up because there was a great rush of fire from it when it left. It must have been quite high when it exploded. [Cox, 1948]"
How do we make sense of this strange witnessed event of such a low class technology - a fire breathing funnel complete with pipe and sparks? It's reminiscent of Cash Landrum and it's just plain bizarre, yet the witness is clear and straight. When I look at all of this I'm not prepared to dismiss ET outright, as what witnesses see is so strange, but I also have to consider the human mind as playing a definitive role in the outcomes, suspicions and with what was both witnessed, and believed.
This milieu would surely have a major effect on those investigating and reporting as Sign gave way to Grudge or also known as the battle of believers vs. non-believers. The mystery persists and I do think looking backwards at what went on helps us to get a clearer sense of how we got here. Those early reports and projects do tell us a lot, would've loved to have read The Estimate.
Unfortunately one of Sentry's links took me nowhere and that was the one dealing with Stills from the Cooper Film. Do you have know other links I could try that would show me those still shots? The other a Bluebook reference is one that I want to go over and look at In is context.
